Owen Oyston will have to sell Blackpool to pay off some of the £22m his family owes to the Latvian banker Valeri Belokon.
Photograph: Ryan Browne/BPI/Rex/Shutterstock

Blackpool have been put into receivership so the club can be sold and the proceeds used to pay off some of the £22m owed by their owners, the Oyston family, to the Latvian banker Valeri Belokon, a court has ordered.

English Football League rules state that if a club suffer “an insolvency event”, which includes the appointment of a receiver, they receive a 12-point deduction, but the league has not yet determined whether that penalty will be imposed in this case.

The receivership of the club, an associated company and other assets owned by Owen Oyston and his son, the former club chairman Karl, was ordered by the high court after it heard the money is still owed to Belokon.

The millions are owed by the Oystons to Belokon following a court judgment in 2017 that the Oystons “illegitimately stripped” the club of £26.77m in a salary and other payments to their own companies, following Blackpool’s single 2010-11 season in the Premier League. They were ordered to pay that sum to Belokon, plus the £4.5m cost of his 20% investment in the club in 2006, a total of £31m, of which only £10m is understood to have been paid.

Belokon cannot be the owner or a director of the club, of which he was formerly a 20% shareholder and investor, because he was convicted in 2017, in Kyrgyzstan, of multimillion-dollar money laundering. He has described the conviction as “politically motivated” and claimed it “ignored the most basic principles of natural justice”.

The league’s chief executive, Shaun Harvey, said the receivership of Blackpool would be discussed at the EFL’s next board meeting in three weeks’ time – during which Harvey and the league’s executive will be expected to study the details of the court judgment and its implications.

“We will be seeking an early meeting with the receiver, so as to ensure the best interests of the club can be jointly considered, against the context of our regulatory framework,” Harvey said.

The receivership is the latest step by Belokon in his long-running dispute with the Oystons, after their partnership, which they had agreed would become a 50-50 share of the club, soured following the large payments out of the club. They included £11m paid as a director’s salary to one of Owen Oyston’s companies. Justice Marcus Smith ruled in the 2017 judgment that the £11m was not truly a salary, describing it as an “essentially gratuitous” payment to Owen Oyston.

Paul Cooper and David Rubin, of David Rubin & Partners, issued a statement confirming they had been appointed as joint receivers to enforce the 2017 judgment obtained by Belokon’s company against Blackpool Football Club (Properties) Limited, Owen Oyston, Karl Oyston and Blackpool Football Club Limited.

Paul Cooper said in the statement: “David Rubin & Partners are only too aware of the history of Blackpool football club, the central part the club plays in the community and the emotions involved for those supporters dedicated to securing its future.

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“This has obviously been an unsettling period in the club’s history. But in this time of uncertainty, the joint receivers will be doing everything in their power to keep the fans informed of relevant developments.”

Many Blackpool fans, led by the supporters’ trust, have been boycotting matches at Bloomfield Road for years in protest at the Oystons’ running of the club.